A Platform Built for the Over-55s Has Put 5,400 People Back Into Paid Work, From Greater Porto to the Algarve
Elena Duran started 55+ in five Greater Lisbon parishes in 2018. It now runs in two metropolitan areas, in Aveiro and across the Algarve, has logged more than 60,300 hours of work, and in Leiria and the Algarve councils pay for clients who cannot.
More than 5,400 people aged 55 or over have found paid work through a Portuguese digital platform built for exactly that group, in the two metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, in Aveiro and across the Algarve. Between them they have delivered more than 60,300 hours of work: hanging light fittings, replacing sockets, fixing household plumbing, cooking in clients' homes, gardening, cleaning, sewing, minding children and animals, teaching English and music, and accompanying older neighbours to medical appointments.
The platform is called 55+, and it was started in 2018 by Elena Durán, from Jaén in southern Spain, across five parishes of Greater Lisbon. "What we do is activate, value and promote the participation and the contribution of people over 55 who are in a situation of inactivity, whether through unemployment, retirement or early retirement," she told ECO. The stated aim is to turn that experience into "agents of change in their own territories".
The premise is a mismatch that Portuguese labour statistics describe from the other direction. Unemployment fell to 5.3 percent in June, the lowest reading since 2011, and registered jobseekers have been dropping for months, yet local economies keep reporting that they cannot find people. At the same time a substantial cohort leaves the labour market in its late fifties and sixties and does not come back, taking decades of skills with it.
Two ways to pay for it
The scheme runs on two models. The first is straightforward: a household that wants a job done and can pay for it books someone through the platform. The second, which Durán calls "double impact", covers people who need the help and cannot pay, with councils and partner organisations meeting the cost of the hours worked. That version currently operates only in Leiria and in the Algarve.
"In Leiria, for example, we have the support of the Instituto da Segurança Social (Social Security Institute), while in the Algarve we already have help from the Fundação Auchan, the Câmara Municipal de Loulé (Loulé Municipal Council) and European funds for social innovation," Durán said. In Porto the platform is part of the local social network but has no formal protocol with the council. The model has also crossed a border: 55+ now operates in Barcelona.
Why the age band
Fifty-five is early to be counted out. It is roughly a decade before the statutory retirement age, and it falls inside the stretch of working life when an unemployment claim is longest and a return to work hardest. Portugal's benefit ladder stretches to 26 months for the oldest claimants precisely because that re-entry is slow, and the state's solidarity top-up for the poorest elderly reached a record 245,500 recipients this year.
What 55+ is testing is whether the gap can be closed from below, by matching small local needs to people who already live nearby and can meet them, rather than by waiting for an employer to advertise a full-time post. For newer arrivals in the same age band, the practical routes into Portuguese working life are set out in our guide to finding a job in Portugal as a foreigner.
Durán frames the question as a loss rather than a shortfall. For her, the issue is not only what happens to a person when they leave the labour market: it is what a community gives up when it stops drawing on everything that person still has to offer.
Feature image: Mercado Municipal de Loulé. Photograph by Marc Ryckaert, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
